June 29, 2023

4 Pieces of Sales Collateral Your Business Needs

Proper sales collateral can mean the difference between a successful revenue team and a so-so revenue team, but many small businesses aren’t tapping into this resource.

Sales collateral helps your sales team educate potential clients about your brand and is usually developed by your marketing team or marketing agency. If done right, sales collateral keeps your sellers on brand, simplifies your offering to your potential clients, and gives your sellers resources to consult and leave behind. Not bad outcomes at all!

The problem is that many small businesses haven’t developed the necessary sales collateral to grow their business. We’re helping change that. Read on to learn about common mistakes we see businesses make when writing sales collateral and the pieces of sales collateral you need to develop for your business.

Common Sales Collateral Mistakes

Sales Collateral Mistake 1: Failing To Segment

Many organizations tend to only think of their sales teams as a “bottom of the marketing funnel resource.” That can be a mistake. Depending on the deal, the customer, and how they came to your brand, the potential customer might actually be at the top or middle of the marketing funnel when they first talk to a salesperson. Low-funnel sales collateral won’t make a difference if the prospect is still only comparing your product or solution to a competitor. To combat this, ensure that your sales team has content for all stages of the deal cycle. This will vary from customer to customer. Typically, we recommend infographics for top-of-funnel, battle cards for prospects considering you versus another competitor, and case studies for mid-funnel.

Sales Collateral Mistake 2: Reusing Marketing Content As Sales Content

We want to clarify something here. Repurposing marketing content CAN be really useful. However, some small businesses, strapped for time, sometimes copy and paste marketing content from email marketing or their website into a piece of sales collateral. That’s likely a mistake. We have found that the prospect’s needs in the sales cycle are so different from their needs when they’re first learning about your brand. Now, rewriting or building upon a past blog or email promotion to create your sales collateral is a great option. Just be sure to adjust appropriately if you reuse marketing content in sales collateral.

Sales Collateral Mistake 3: Failing To Divide External & Internal Content

Not all sales collateral is meant to be read by the end prospect. Sometimes, your sales team needs help overcoming objections, synthesizing information, and staying true to your brand’s message. If sellers need help communicating the finer points of your value proposition, then internal-only talk tracks might be necessary pieces of sales collateral. Just be sure that it is crystal clear which piece of content is meant to be read by a prospect and which is only for a seller to consult. You don’t want to inadvertently give a prospect your entire sales playbook merely because a seller was unsure what was external and what was internal. This division of sales content into external and internal can also save you time. A properly branded piece of sales collateral requires a lot of graphic design to really impress a prospect. An internal-only piece might require a little less.

Sales Collateral Mistake 4: Failing To Align Sales & Marketing

Too many brands think of the line between sales and marketing as a line in the sand. In this framework, every deal can be neatly and cleanly handed off from marketing to the sales team. A clear before and after, where the deal has passed from marketing to sales. However, this framework doesn’t help sales and marketing work together to close deals.

Let’s walk through an example. Imagine a lead found your website on Google, thanks to your SEO campaign, and submitted a request for an appointment. A sales rep then schedules time with them to review their problem. In the “line in the sand” approach, marketing’s job is done. The lead has gone off their plate and is on the sales team’s plate. However, in our opinion, the marketing team’s job isn’t over; it’s only morphed! We recommend including that lead on email marketing promotions, even as they chat with your sales team, for the best results. The lead is likely still learning about your brand, and your marketing content is still useful, even as they plan out a deal with Sales.

The more marketing and sales collaborate to move deals through to close, the better your outcomes will be. Trust us.

Common Types of Sales Collateral

Case Studies: Everyone says that they’re the best. Potential clients are thus a little skeptical, and that skepticism is warranted. Combat this skepticism with social proof in the form of a case study. This demonstration of your excellence proves you’re the real deal. If you have a client that is willing to testify on camera about what you did for them, even better.

Battle Cards: When your prospect is considering your solution vs a direct competitor, nothing is as useful to your sales team as a battle card. This side-by-side comparison demonstrates the offerings, strengths, and differences between you and any given competitor and gives your sales team a talk track to help overcome objections. It’s important to note that battle cards can be both client-facing and merely an internal resource to help your sellers format their responses to objections.

Whitepapers: Sometimes, your solution is a technically complex one, or your prospect’s need is very intricate. A whitepaper highlighting your thought leadership and industry expertise, is a great piece of sales collateral for these situations. The end goal of a well-written whitepaper is to elaborate on an industry problem at a high level of detail. These pieces of content are usually great resources to leave with prospects as conversations are beginning to demonstrate what your brand has contributed to the industry’s conversation around a topic.

Infographics: Infographics are quick, digestible pieces of content that outline what problem you solve and what that means for your prospect. This piece of sales collateral should be one-page and boost plenty of graphics and eye-catching images. The goal with this piece of collateral isn’t to win a deal immediately; it’s to give the client a quick run-down of who you are and build some awareness. We recommend sending this piece of sales collateral out after meetings with prospects so that they have a summary piece of content to consult later or show to other internal team members.

Develop Your Dream Sales Collateral With JSL

As a small business, you don’t have the marketing resources that a larger sales organization might. That’s okay! You can still compete at the highest level with the help of a quality marketing agency.

JSL Marketing & Web Design is an award-winning marketing agency headquartered in Dallas, TX. We’ve been helping clients develop their dream content for years and are waiting in the wings to help you put your story on the page!

In addition to any of the above pieces of sales collateral, we might also recommend…

Formalizing A Brand Style Guide
A Competitive Analysis
Market Research
Logo & Graphic Design Improvements
Digital Marketing
& More

Fill Out The Contact Form To Talk Shop

May 25, 2023

How Should Marketers Use ChatGPT?

If you’ve been following the news lately, you know that Chat GPT is the newest and hottest trend. The advent of Open AI’s ChatGPT has the world abuzz and its reverberations are likely to be felt across a multitude of industries.

Data and tech types have been enraptured by how advanced the machine language processing of ChatGPT is. Employment experts are torn over whether or not this tech will create more jobs or result in widespread layoffs. And then some of us are just trying to write essays about world history in the style of a Nickelodeon cartoon. Regardless of your thoughts on ChatGPT and opinions on whether it’s a net positive or another piece of tech humanity is too incompetent to use correctly, it’s impossible to deny that Chat GPT will have a huge impact on the world.

The marketing world is not immune from this buzz. The practical benefits and technical imperfections of ChatGPT have got many in the industry asking themselves a question: how should marketers use ChatGPT?

We have our thoughts on the pros and cons of ChatGPT and whether or not it is capable of changing the marketing world. ChatGPT is an exciting and revolutionary piece of tech, but we don’t see it taking any marketing jobs quite yet. However, we are excited about the tech and what it could possibly do for the marketing world.

Read Onto Learn More About ChatGPT & How Marketers Should Use It!

What ChatGPT Can’’t Do

ChatGPT is an amazing piece of tech, but it does have limitations. The technology is so new that comprehensive analysis has not been done, but some flaws are readily apparent. Experts have noticed that ChatGPT is phenomenal at processing information, but it lacks the ability to analyze at times. So, for instance, if you ask ChatGPT to write an essay about if a multi-level marketing scheme is worth it, it will succinctly recap the pros and cons for you.

However, ChatGPT will not weight these positions towards the evidence for each position, but will instead merely offer both the evidence for and against an MLM as equally valid. This sort of noncommittal and apathetic summary is fine if you ask ChatGPT to discuss the pros and cons of New World Vs Old World wine, since these are taste-dependent opinions. It could potentially be life-altering if ChatGPT takes this approach with something as serious as a medical, legal, or engineering question. ChatGPT can summarize well, but it can’t offer professional recommendations the same way a tenured doctor, lawyer or engineer could. (Or at least, it can’t yet.)

ChatGPT also is designed to give answers. It’s not designed to ensure that every piece of information presented is fully accurate. So, it is possible for ChatGPT to offer different answers to the exact same question, if prompted consecutively. Remember, ChatGPT wants to give you what you’re looking for, even if you already have received correct information.

These aren’t the only flaws with the system. ChatGPT is often too verbose when compared to a human professional’s recommendation, it often struggles with idioms and slang, and it cannot quite express complex emotions as simply as humans can. As it turns out, there actually are elements of being human that AI can’t fully experience and understand.

These flaws don’t render ChatGPT useless. It is important, however, to remember what the system can and cannot do. With that in mind, you can be better positioned to use ChatGPT effectively in ways that the tech can shine.

ChatGPT Marketing Use 1: Rough Draft

The main capability of ChatGPT as we see it is its ability to generate rough drafts. Every marketer who has written marketing copy before knows that not all drafts see the light of day and for good reason. Sometimes, you need to scrap a few drafts before you end up on the right path. All of these rewrites burn time. ChatGPT potentially could be your new resource for rough drafts. Ask ChatGPT to write your rough drafts and then consult what it has produced. Do you like the structure? Is the style what you’re going for? Is something lacking?

These rough drafts don’t merely provide you a resource to consult; they potentially could be a start on your final iteration. If your topic is simple enough, consider cleaning up and smoothing out the rough edges of ChatGPT’s first draft to get to your end draft. Your marketing content production time has just been halved without any drop in quality.

ChatGPT Marketing Use 2: Insight Stream

Similarly to the rough draft idea, ChatGPT offers marketers the ability to pull in additional insights through ChatGPT’s automation. Imagine you need to write a whitepaper for a very specific and technical industry. Typically, this would require quite a bit of research and planning to fully understand the layout and structure necessary for this whitepaper. Now, let’s say you have access to ChatGPT and decide to ask ChatGPT to write a rough draft for you. Basically, nothing too different from our previously mentioned rough draft idea.

As previously mentioned, you’ll need to edit, fact-check and reformat elements of the ChatGPT rough draft. However, ChatGPT’s machine-learning allows it to access more information than any one human could analyze. This means that ChatGPT will likely take your whitepaper in a different direction than you would have previously thought of taking. The nuances ChatGPT includes could prompt you to research an industry-specific trend you were not previously aware of and thus create a stronger and more compelling white paper. Essentially, ChatGPT is now your free machine-learning researcher and that’s a great resource for a marketer to have on standby, especially for technical writing.

ChatGPT Marketing Use 3: Expedite Processes

ChatGPT’s main strength is that it is capable of speeding up production times. While it’s not intelligent enough to automate certain high-level tasks, ChatGPT is sophisticated enough to perform writing tasks that previously only humans could complete. Imagine the basic and tedious typing and retyping that goes into writing social media posts, email campaigns and paid search campaigns. These sorts of writing tasks usually aren’t terribly complex, but they do take time.

Just like how ChatGPT can be used to make rough drafts, it can also be used to take first stabs at copy. While it will require research, editing, and strategic insight to approve and use ChatGPT’s copy, the machine-learning is nuanced enough to speed up the production of marketing assets. The more mundane elements of marketing writing can be automated at this point. Marketers can now focus on researching, planning, and testing campaign specifics and outsource the tedious elements of writing to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT Marketing Use 4: Experiment

No one writes marketing content just to write content. If you’re writing marketing copy, you’re doing so for your audience, whether you’re a freelancer, a marketing agency, an internal marketing team, or a business owner and these stakeholders typically want their marketing content written a certain way. Typically, you have deadlines, style guides, and target keywords to be aware of as well. That’s without the stressors of all of the other hats you wear in both your professional and personal life. Unfortunately, due to budget and time constraints, most marketers don’t experiment with creative writing in their marketing projects.

But what if that could change? What if ChatGPT could be your soundboard for changes in content tone? Imagine having the ability to ask ChatGPT to write four or five different blogs or email promotions, but each with a distinct tone. Maybe your brand has always had a more laid back tone, but you see elements of ChatGPT’s crack at a formalized tone that intrigue you. Maybe you’ve struggled with writing conversational ad copy, but you see glimmers of a new brand voice with ChatGPT. That could potentially revolutionize your brand’s tone and messaging and without much effort at all on your end!

ChatGPT Marketing Use 5: A/B Test

This isn’t a direct use of ChatGPT, but rather an outgrowth of the product. As we’ve mentioned prior, ChatGPT has the potential to cut production times dramatically and basically automate mundane writing tasks. Now, imagine using ChatGPT to produce different and distinct styles of email messages, ad copy and blogs. We recommend investing that extra time into evaluating which version of a piece of content drives the best results.

Marketers have been A/B and A/B/C testing since the dawn of time, but too often, the time required to create copy prohibits many marketing teams from really A/B/C testing as often as they should. With ChatGPT, the time spent to create ad copy is removed as a constraint and marketers can now test virtually endless combinations of copy in their paid ads, email campaigns, and web content.

Evaluate Your Marketing Strategy With JSL Marketing & Web Design

ChatGPT will absolutely shake up the marketing world. This new technology means that producing quality marketing content will be easier than ever. However, the mere use of ChatGPT will not guarantee success. More and more businesses will rely on ChatGPT to produce more content than ever in the years ahead and proper marketing strategy will become more and more important. The difference between successful brands and mediocre brands in the post-ChatGPT world won’t be technology; it will be strategy, ability to pivot, and research capabilities. Good tech means faster production times, but a strategic and well-researched mindset always trumps tech in the marketing world, in our experience.

Need some help getting your marketing strategy ironed out? Turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design! We’re ready to discuss …

Brand Messaging
Content Strategy
Branding & Logo Design
Market Research
Competitive Analysis
& More!

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May 11, 2023

5 Quick Google Ad Optimizations

If you’re looking for quick Google Ad optimizations, you’ve come to the right place!

Google Ads is the premier destination for advertisers online. Millions of dollars are spent on Google every day and it’s estimated that Google Ads generates over 140 billion dollars a year for Alphabet. Google Ads is a staple of the global digital marketing ecosystem and thousands upon thousands of advertisers use this platform to reach their consumers. The reason why is simple. Google Ads offers a cost-effective pricing model, substantial reach and enhanced reporting. If you are a small business owner who is not utilizing Google Ads, we strongly recommend you begin investing in paid search campaigns to grow your business..

However, every pay-per-click marketer knows that managing Google Ads is part science, part art.. The Google Ads pay-per-click marketplace is a dynamic and ever changing environment and even the best campaigns need tweaks to ensure best results. While we wish it was possible to set and forget ad campaigns, there will be times that optimizations are necessary. Enter our recommendations for quick Google Ad fixes!

It’s important to note that these are quick fixes. All of these recommendations are simple and straightforward changes that any pay-per-click marketer worth their salt could implement in an hour or two. They will improve performance on any ad account, but they won’t immediately right the ship if your keyword strategy is off, your budget is too low, or your copy is poorly written. Rather, the below list of optimizations are simple steps for improvement that we recommend you start with. 80% improvement can be seen from 20% of the work, as they say, so we recommend starting with simple fixes before investing more time in substantive and more technically-complex optimizations.

Google Ad Fix 1: Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are phrases that Google will block from your ad campaigns. As a rule, search specialists use the tactic to exclude search terms they don’t want to spend money on. Every keyword you target on Google Ads will inevitably receive clicks from search terms that aren’t relevant. It’s just a part of digital marketing. Think of targeting “cheese” as a search term and receiving clicks from “cheese cake.” The good news is that this waste can be prevented and minimized with the addition of specific negative keywords.

Imagine you are a specialty online cheese shop. You have a “Manchego” ad group with specific keywords centered on this cheese product you offer. When you go and analyze search term reports, you see that this keyword is appearing for a variety of search terms. Let’s say that “what is manchego” and “what is manchego cheese” are two common terms you appear for.

You see, however, that while you receive a lot of clicks from these search terms, you have not received a single purchase from these terms. That’s to be expected; the “what is” search terms signal an interest in learning about manchego cheese, not necessarily an interest in purchasing. In addition to blocking these individual search terms, we’d recommend adding “what is” as a negative keyword. Proactively and strategically using negative keywords allows you to refine your Google Ads campaigns and focus on the terms that are most impactful for your business.

Google Ad Fix 2: Pause Low-Performers

Out of all of the fixes we recommend, this might be the easiest solution. Sometimes, the exclusion of poor performing ads, keywords and ad groups can be all you need to see better results. Let’s say in our cheese shop example, you’ve been running ad campaigns for a quarter and have some data to work with. You see in the Google Ads user interface that your Parmesan, Manchego, and Gorgonzola ad groups are producing a positive return on ad spend and the Specialty Cheeses ad group has produced only one sale, despite taking up 10% of your budget. Pausing Specialty Cheeses is likely a good call to free up budget to go towards more cost-effective ad groups.

The same principle holds true for individual ads and keywords. We recommend ensuring that you have enough data to justify any pause, but sometimes, disinvesting from certain ads, ad groups, and keywords is the right strategy for Google Ads Success.

Google Ads Fix 3: Evaluate Match Types

We like to use a fishing analogy to explain Google Ads to a non-marketing audience. Think of the search terms users type into Google like particular types of fish. The keywords you decide to enable, which will trigger your ads showing for a particular search term, are bait. Some keywords might sound like a good way to catch a certain type of search term, but actually only bring in unwanted search terms. Some align well to a premier type of search term and might not catch many search terms, but catch high-quality clicks.

That’s where match types come in. Match types tell Google Ads how wide a net to cast with any given keyword, to continue the fishing analogy. The three “nets” are board match, phrase match, and exact match and each has a unique advantage and disadvantage.

Let’s say you’re targeting the keyword “marketing agencies in Dallas.” That one keyword could potentially appear for very different search terms, depending on the match type selected. With a broad match type, you would reach Google users researching topics related to “marketing agencies in Dallas.” With a phrase match, your ads would appear for search queries with the same meaning as your specific keywords. An exact match type would only let your ads be triggered by search terms with the exact same meaning as your keyword. So, to recap, a broad match type will reach the widest, but least refined audience, an exact match type will reach the narrowest, but most refined audience, with phrase match being between the two.

Let’s return to our cheese shop analogy. Let’s say that the Parmesan ad group is hardly getting any clicks. A good way of combating this would be to utilize more broad match and phrase match keywords, if you’re mostly running exact match keywords. Inversely, if this ad group was wasting budget and clicks on unrelated search terms, you’re probably casting too wide a net and need to focus on phrase and exact match, if you’re running only broad match keywords.

Google Ads Fix 4: Consider The Landing Page

Landing page experience is a key component of quality scores, the measure Google Ads uses to evaluate how relevant your ad is to what the user typed into Google. If your ad takes those who click it to a poorly-correlated landing page, you will be dinged for it by Google.

Now, you don’t need to be egregiously wrong with the landing pages you drive traffic towards to pay a price. If you’re not smart with the landing pages you select for your ad campaigns, you can still suffer a consequence. Let’s again return to our online cheese shop. Let’s say all ads lead towards your homepage. That’s not a bad destination at all! However, remember that, in this fictitious example, you’re running multiple ad groups for specific cheese search terms. Your homepage is a fine landing page, but if a user clicks on an ad promoting “cheddar cheese,” they’re probably expecting to see that product on the landing page they end up on.

With that in mind, consider the results your campaign could see with a few landing pagechanges. We’d recommend choosing cheese-specific landing pages for specific ad groups. Let’s say your web page has a Parmesan subsection, for instance. We’d recommend placing that as your landing page for that specific ad group for best results! Reducing the number of clicks necessary to complete a purchase and aligning ads to the contents of the landing page is a great strategy to increase checkouts and ensure that you are not suffering a relevancy ding from Google.

Google Ads Fix 5: Evaluate Your Strategy & Adjust Bidding

Google Ads allows users to set distinct bidding strategies to help maximize campaign performance. We could spend days discussing the tech and strategies behind each one, but for now, know that each bidding strategy correlates to a goal for that campaign. For instance, a “maximize clicks” bidding strategy tells Google to prioritize clicks on your ads over all other key performance indicators. A “maximize conversions” bidding strategy tells the platform to focus on conversions, like phone calls, check outs, or requests for information, over all other key performance indicators.

Now, it’s imperative that you utilize the right bidding strategy when setting up a Google Ads campaign and that your selected bidding strategy correlates to your wider business objectives. This might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how easy it is to select the wrong bidding strategy if you are unfamiliar with Google Ads. Let’s once again return to our cheese shop. In this instance, conversions, or checkouts from the site’s online store, are probably going to be the most impactful for this business’s bottom line.

However, let’s assume that the cheese shop is new and has very little brand recognition. Because of this, the shop’s main goal is to get as many eyes on its ads, website, and content as possible, to familiarize the market with the shop’s name and cheese offerings. A slower start to online sales is fine with the cheese shop, since they know that they need the brand recognition to kick off their digital marketing. Given all of that information, a Target Impression Share bidding strategy might actually be best for the cheese shop, since they just want to familiarize their target customers with their wares, even if that means less online sales in the short term. We’d likely recommend quickly copying and relaunching the shop’s campaigns with a Target Impression Share bid strategy.

Maybe you’re focusing on CTR as the main goal for your ad campaigns, but need to report on Return on Ad Spend to show success. Maybe you’re focusing on Return On Ad Spend as a main goal, despite the fact that your product is quite technical and complicated and is often purchased after a long and deliberative sales cycle. Regardless of what your use case is, consider what bidding strategy you’re using in Google Ads and determine if you need to make tweaks to better align with your business needs.

Improve Google Ads With JSL

It’s again worth repeating that these are all quick fixes. These recommendations are simple, easy-to-implement, and don’t require a lot of time. Plus, all of these recommendations will help improve performance. However, if your Google Ads strategy needs more work, none of these corrections will work miracles. That’s not to say that our recommendations aren’t effective; sometimes, more effort and research is needed to achieve better results if you’re in a high-competition market or new to Pay-Per-Click marketing.

That’s where we come in.

JSL Marketing & Web Design is a full-service marketing agency, based out of Dallas, Texas. We’re not only an industry-leader in SEO; we’re your strategic advisor on all things marketing related.

Depending on your unique needs, we can work on improving…

Ad Messaging
A/B Testing
Keyword Research
Audience Targeting & Observing
Competitive Marketplace Positioning
Landing Page Experience
Ad Group Breakouts
& More!

Fill Out The Contact Form For A Free Google Ads Audit!

April 06, 2023

3 Quick Ways To Remarket To Existing Customers

Remarketing to your existing customers is a foolproof way to grow your business, but too few small businesses use remarketing effectively!

Many small businesses don’t have the time to invest in multiple marketing projects. We get it; you’re busy, and there’s only one of you to go around. At first glance, putting your time and energy into gaining new customers might make sense. After all, why would you want to put your marketing dollars toward customers you already have in your camp?

Well, the reason why you should consider marketing to existing customers is pretty simple. It’s effective! Your current customers already know your brand and have some familiarity with your offerings. Per this, they’re likely to repurchase from you, making remarketing to current customers a great way to use your marketing dollars effectively.

Think of gaining net new customers via marketing like hunting. It’s time and energy-intensive, but it can be rewarding if done right! Inversely, think of remarketing to your current customers like tending an orchard. It will require a lot of time to plant and grow the orchard. The orchard will likely require more tender loving care at first, and maintaining this orchard will be time-intensive. But if done right, you’ll be able to reap rewards from that orchard for years to come and often with mere maintenance work, not the laborious amount of effort and luck required to hunt.

That’s your customer base! If done right, you can win repeat business from a customer for years and years, and what’s more, you can win this repeat business cost-effectively. That’s one of the reasons why we recommend putting your marketing dollars and effort into marketing to existing customers. Yes, they are currently a customer, but you’ll likely find it easier and more cost-effective to grow their business than incentivizing a new customer to purchase.

To help you plan out your remarketing campaign, we assembled our thoughts on quick, easy ways to reach your current customers and grow your customer base!

Remarketing Tip 1: Brand Collateral

As a digital marketing agency, we love the Internet. The worldwide web has done so much for marketing and for the marketing of small businesses in particular. No one can deny that. Still, it is worth remembering that marketing did exist before Google, as shocking as that might be. Brand collateral is a great example of marketing in the long-forgotten B.G years. (Before Google!)

Moreover, brand collateral is a great example of how you can use remarketing to stay top-relevant with your current customers. Distributing free branded items for customers or at an event your brand sponsors is a great way to stay top of mind.

Imagine you’re a doctor’s office distributing free, branded refrigerator magnets to every new patient. While this might be an altruistic service, it can also serve an ulterior motive. Keeping your name and brand on the fridge door for your past customer to see dramatically increases the odds they return the next time they need a health concern treated!

There are numerous branded items your business could produce, among them…

Pens
Shirts
Notepads
Mugs & Drinkware
Stickers
& More!

Remarketing Tip 2: Email Updates

Email marketing is a great way to reach your current customers. For one, it’s extremely affordable. While the software necessary to run email marketing does require some investment, the cost of sending emails is practically nil. This makes email marketing one of the highest Return-on-Investment marketing activities.

We recommend using email marketing to keep your current customers engaged. There are a couple of ways of doing this. Customer recall campaigns are a strategic and simple way of keeping a past customer interested. We typically recommend sending a confirmation email directly after any purchase, whether it’s an online purchase or a physical appointment. After that, a monthly follow-up, followed by a three-month check-in, is a great cadence to keep in touch. Regardless of how you structure this campaign, we encourage you to consider what cadence makes sense for your customers and your unique needs.

Another great use of email marketing is the promotion of new products and services. These “email blasts,” as they are sometimes called, keep your new specials, offerings, and merchandise top of mind with your customer base. For best results, segment out your customer base into smaller sub-lists. For instance, if you sell college sports merchandise online, we’d recommend sending an email about new sweatshirts only to those who purchased a sweatshirt in the past for best results.

There’s a lot you can do with email marketing. We usually recommend …

Email Blasts
Business Newsletters
Customer Recall Campaigns
& More!

Remarketing Tip 3: Loyalty Clubs

A loyalty club is a great way to incentivize your best customers to keep coming back. These promotional clubs incentivize your best customers by cultivating an air of exclusivity. Let’s face it; we all love feeling like we’re in the “in-crowd.” A loyalty program is a great way to make your best customers feel like they’re getting in on the ground floor. However, your loyalty program also provides tangible offerings to your top customers that aren’t merely psychological.

We recommend using a customer loyalty program to…

Try Out New Specials & Discounts Before Launching To Your Wider Customer Base
Incentivize Increased Ordering (Buy 5, Get 2 Free, etc., etc.)
Research Customer Wish Lists For Your Product Or Service
Cross-Sell Your Customers On A New Product Or Service
Upsell Your Clients On A More Premium Version Of Your Product Or Service
Gather Information For Other Marketing Activities (Email Addresses, Phone Numbers, etc., etc.)
Ask Top Clients For Google Reviews Or Video Testimonials For Broader Marketing Efforts

Each of these recommendations could be its own blog post, and we encourage you to do more digging into each point before rolling it out at your business. Regardless, our point still stands; there’s a lot you can do with a customer loyalty club beyond merely upselling, cross-selling, or incentivizing more purchases.

The members of your customer loyalty club should be your most engaged and most eager clients. Use their opinions and recommendations to gather marketing information, enhance your business’s offerings, and improve your marketing efforts. Trust us; the more you talk to your top customers, the more you’ll learn, and that’s never a bad outcome.

Remarket To Existing Customers With JSL

Every business is different. If you plan on marketing to your current customers, you might need strategic advice from a trusted marketing partner to help you reach your goals. If you need help discerning what is and isn’t working in your current marketing and think an outside expert could be helpful, contact JSL Marketing & Web Design today!

Your brand is unique and has specific needs. Our process takes all of that into consideration. You’ll never be treated like your brand is just like everyone else because, well, it’s not! Marketing is complex. We factor that complexity into our process by getting to know you and your strategic goals. From there, we then work to develop a custom marketing plan for your unique needs!

After that free strategic consultation, we might recommend…

Market Research
Google Ad Campaigns
Email Remarketing
Sales Collateral
Social Media Development
& More!

Fill Out The Contact Form To Talk Shop!

March 23, 2023

How to Write B2B Marketing Content

B2B marketing content can be a huge plus for any business, but a lot of brands don’t have it mastered. That’s a shame, because, if done right, business-to-business marketing content can supercharge your business. But there is, of course, a big caveat: you need to actually know how to write B2B content correctly!

Read on to learn more about …

The importance of B2B marketing content
Tips and tricks for B2B marketing writing
How to promote B2B marketing content

The Importance of Well-Written B2B Content

The importance of well-written B2B content can’t be understated. Business-to-business marketing is a very different beast than business-to-customer marketing. A great example of business-to-consumer marketing is a local pizzeria. The sales cycle for every pie ordered from that pizzeria isn’t particularly long or complex. It could take you all of a few minutes to decide that you really want a pepperoni pizza for dinner!

Contrast that with the sales cycle for a new accounting software system. You can’t just go out and pick one of those up at the corner store! This will be a longer deal cycle, will be a more complicated implementation, and will likely require the buy-in of multiple people at the business purchasing the software. That’s a more complicated sale and that’s reflected in the marketing.

Our neighborhood pizza place can essentially sell to anyone and their marketing will probably be about the quick sale. Local SEO, pay-per-click advertising, web design, and paid social media campaigns are all great ways to find and close pizza sales. Our accounting software vendor absolutely should invest in those marketing mediums, but they probably aren’t closing many deals from one single click on an ad. That’s where B2B marketing content enters the equation.

Well-written content has a place in B2C marketing, but B2C web content will likely focus on ranking the website in question for high value search terms. So, if you’re our fictitious pizzeria, you’ll likely use your blogs and web pages to rank number 1 in your area for terms like “pizza near me.”

Not so with B2B content. B2B content is so critically important because of the complexity of the sales cycle and product. It’s hard to distill your message to 100 characters in a search ad if you’re selling accounting software. Longer form content helps you educate and entice your business-to-business prospect!

Well-written business-to-business content should …

Educate your prospect about your brand.
Entice high-ranking decision-makers at target accounts to request more information.
Help you build your lead list for further marketing.
Equip your sales team with useful brand collateral to help with meetings.

Tips To Writing B2B Marketing Content

Offer Something Of Value: Quick, pithy observations about your industry and a sales pitch won’t quite do it when you’re writing B2B content. The content you’re producing needs to be authoritative, well-written, and enticing, but more than anything, it needs to be ‘valuable.’ If you’re trying to gain the attention of decision-makers, your content needs to offer something worthwhile if you expect them to give you their time and read the content. Maybe it’s an analysis of the industry. Maybe it’s new research into a specific topic. Maybe it’s information on a common problem. Regardless of the details, ensure that you are writing something that offers valuable information. One of the best ways to make sure you get this right is to….
Know Your Audience: The more you understand your audience, their situations, and their problems, the better your content will be. This goes beyond merely identifying who you want to be reaching with your business-to-business content, although that is a good first step! We encourage you to go beyond identifying an audience to understanding the way this audience interacts with their broader industry. If you can simultaneously comprehend industry-specific trends and connect those trends to the problems and concerns of your target accounts, you’re going to be able to write much more impactful business-to-business content.
Use Data To Validate Your Conclusions: You can’t merely offer some observations about your subject industry and walk away. You need to provide something of value, and that could include the use of data. Now, you don’t need to run a massive experiment and report back on some great industry trends. That could be difficult for a small business to implement. However, be prepared to find and cite convincing research in this content if needed.
Longer Content Might Be Useful: If you’ve followed this blog series, you know that we encourage brevity when writing marketing content. No one wants to read the next great American novel when trying to learn something from a blog. However, while you need to avoid word stuffing like you’re in the 8th grade and trying to clear an English teacher’s word minimum, a longer piece of content could be helpful. Remember, your B2B marketing content will be read by business leaders looking to learn more about a complex problem. The macroeconomic, industry-specific problems that are driving your readers to learn more through your content are complex and nuanced topics. A 1,000 word one-sheeter might not cut it. Your readers, as business decision-makers, likely do not have the time to pour over a tome on their industry problem but feel free to create longer content. 2,500-4,000 words should be sufficient for an ebook, report, or analysis.
You Might Spend More Time Researching Than Writing: A B2C blog, hosted on your website, probably doesn’t need a lot of research time. You, conceivably, understand what your pizza shop sells and why people prefer your pies. However, if you’re trying to offer something of value, learn the problems of your audience, cite your sources, and write longer content, expect to do your homework in advance. There’s nothing wrong with this approach! If anything, we encourage it for B2B marketing writing. The difference between fine business-to-business content and amazing B2B content is often research, in our experience.

Supercharge Your B2B Marketing Content

Now, the best written B2B marketing content can only do so much. Your content will still need to be promoted to the right decision makers and once you have their contact information, you’ll need to continue to market to those decision makers.

If you need help from an award-winning digital marketing agency, turn to JSL Marketing & Web Design of Dallas! Our team can help with any of the following!

Google Ads
Email Marketing
SEO
Web Design
Market Research
Brand Development

Call Us Now To Discuss Any Of The Above!

March 09, 2023

How To Choose A Marketing Agency

When you need help expanding your business, knowing how to choose a marketing agency is a great skill to have! Marketing agencies have been industry staples and trusted partners for advertisers for years and the right marketing agency is a huge boon for any brand looking to supercharge their marketing.

However, there’s a myriad of marketing agencies out there and they are not all created equal. Business owners often find themselves fielding pitches from a plethora of prospective marketing agencies and it can be confusing if you aren’t familiar with the marketing industry.

The terminology will be completely new, the pitches will start to blend together, and eventually, the unique, creative agency names will start to sound less cute and more cliche. There’s only so many ways you can purposefully misspell your agency name or claim to be “ground-breaking,” but somehow, every startup agency finds a way to be cliche in their own tired way. The point is, you’re busy growing your business. You don’t have time to separate the real, award-winning agencies from the two-bit pretenders.

That’s why we wrote this blog to help you think through how to choose the right marketing agency!

Read on to learn About Choosing A Marketing Agency!

The Benefits Of A Marketing Agency

Why would you even want to partner with a marketing agency? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

The Right Marketing Agency is A Source of Knowledge

If you’re a small business owner, time is a scarce resource. You don’t have time to learn about the finer points of A/B testing, market research, and SWOT analyses. The right marketing agency can help you fill in those gaps and augment your knowledge of your industry and business with marketing specific knowledge.

The Right Marketing Agency Offers Specific Technical Expertise

Digital marketing is a complicated specialty and it’s short of impossible to master the specifics without working in the industry. Backlinking, schema mark ups, search engine optimization and keyword strategies take time to master and most small businesses just don’t have the time to master these digital marketing practices. A good digital marketing agency will have specific departments or people for specific purposes and that distribution of work lets your business invest in mediums you never thought possible. Now, with the right agency alongside you, you can use SEO, PPC advertising, and web design to grow your business!

The Right Marketing Agency Frees Up Time

Compartmentalizing marketing into separate functions frees up time for all parties involved. Maybe you can manage your in-store marketing and customer loyalty promotions, but need help with bringing in new business. Outsourcing the aspects of your business that an agency partner can manage gives you time to focus on what you do best: managing your business!

How To Choose a Marketing Agency

Well, now that you understand the benefits of marketing agencies, how do you actually choose an agency?

Research Each Agency

Researching any potential marketing agency or marketing partner is the first and ultimately, perhaps the most important part of your process. We can give you great advice, rules of thumb and tips and tricks, but unless you are able to research for yourself, all of that is for naught. We encourage you to delve into any potential marketing agency’s online presence and analyze them thoroughly. You won’t be disappointed.

Consider Your Strategy

While researching a marketing agency for your needs, it’s important to consider your strategy. You can select the best marketing agency in the world, but if you don’t align that choice to your comprehensive marketing strategy, you won’t see the best possible results. If you know your needs, you can better select agencies to help get you there. For instance, if you need to focus on your branding, selecting a marketing agency that specializes in lead generation won’t be a recipe for success. Inversely, if you need market research to better inform your marketing strategy, selecting a branding-focused marketing agency won’t quite cut it.

Ask Potential Agencies For Proof

Asking for proof from any prospective marketing agency is crucial. Every agency will claim to be the best in their niche and it can be confusing if you take all of these agencies at face value. We recommend separating the real deals from the rest by asking for social proof of some sort. Any marketing agency worth their salt should have client testimonials, case studies or white papers for you to review.

Now, because most agencies will have these promotional materials handy, don’t take these promotions at face value. Your potential agencies have likely curated their marketing materials to focus on their best clients, projects, or moments. To combat this, go straight to the source. Reviews on sites like Google Maps, Yelp, and BING will come straight from customers and be more authentic.

Look For Industry Recognition

Finally, any marketing agency worth hiring should have earned the respect of the industry. Keep an eye out for industry awards, memberships, and any recognition that showcases what this marketing agency has been able to do.

Your Dallas Marketing Agency

Enter JSL Marketing & Web Design, your top Dallas marketing agency! We’ve been helping businesses across the Dallas-Fort Worth area grow their businesses for years and are looking forward to partnering with you! Your business is unique. Choose a marketing agency that understands that and helps you promote your business accordingly.

There’s a lot we can say about our business, but we’d rather let our industry awards speak for themselves! They say it all way better than we could!

And our clients’ perspective is definitely worth sharing as well!

“They’ve been wonderful to work with. They’re always on top of any task.” – Melissa W.

We can offer any of the following services to help you promote and grow your business!

Email Marketing
SEO
Market Research
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Web Design
Brand & Logo Development
Content Development

Fill Out The Contact Form Below To Get In Contact With An Expert!

February 09, 2023

6 Ways To Plan Your Small Business Advertising

Planning small business advertising is in some ways quite simple, but as in everything, the devil is in the details. Most small businesses know that they need to do more than just throw ad dollars and marketing budget into oblivion. That’s more than just a hunch; there’s a host of data that supports the claim that strategy increases the effectiveness of advertising dollars.

But while many small businesses know this fact, very few are able to successfully implement advertising strategies that increase their overall marketing strategy. After all, they’re often busy dealing with vendors, new products, and the overall health of the business. Niche types of advertising strategies just aren’t something that most businesses have the time to delve into.

Luckily, the advertising team here at JSL Marketing & Web Design has some recommendations for you!

Read onto learn how to plan your small business advertising!

Advertising & Marketing

Before we get too far, it’s important to define advertising. Most small businesses understand that the two aren’t interchangeable, but it can still be easy to conflate the two. There are a plethora of ways to define advertising, but ultimately, it’s the act of buying a space, whether digital or physical, to display a message to an audience about a topic. More simply put, advertising is a subtactic of marketing, focused on putting the right message in front of the right person.

Marketers have a number of different mediums to educate their target audience and advertising is just one of them. We could speak at length to branding, market research, web development, customer marketing, SEO, and how all of these elements fit into a comprehensive strategy. But in the interest of time, just know for now that advertising is how marketers reach their audience via paid media.

These are some of the more common ways of advertising.

YouTube Ads
Paid Social Media
Google Ads
Broadcast Television Spots
Digital Display Ads
Billboards
Brand Collateral
Online Video
Over-the-Top Television
Digital Out-Of-Home
& More!

Different Types of Small Business Advertising Goals

At the end of the day, all marketing strategies can be reduced to four steps. This plan will look different from brand to brand and industry to industry, but all typically involve….

Defining A Goal
Determining How It Will Be Measured
Designing A Strategy
Executing

We started with this framework to illustrate where advertising comes into play. That might seem extremely straight forward. Advertising is clearly a part of Step 4, the execution phase, right?

Well, yes and no. While advertising would be a tactic within the execution phase, it’s important to remember what your main marketing goal is when planning an advertising strategy. Google Ads, for instance, are a great way to drive clicks and site visits. However, if your main goal is to increase brand awareness, then Google Ads might not be the right advertising for your main goals. Now, if your brand sought to maximize Return On Ad Spend, Google Ads would be a great tactic.

The point is to remember that advertising is an extension of your marketing strategy, not vice versa. Remember what your overall marketing goal is and keep it in mind when crafting an advertising plan to support it. The best ad campaigns in the world can’t drive results if you haven’t aligned your ads to your marketing goal. Start with the strategy first and then move onto the specifics of how you will use advertising to get there. Your bottom line will thank you.

Advertising Goal 1: Increase Brand Awareness

This is likely the most common use of advertising. The average American sees some 1,000 to 2,000 ads in a day and it can be difficult to drive sales if your audience has seen your competitor’s ads more than yours. Making regular touchpoints with prospective customers via brand awareness advertising, often through social media, can be a great way to stop of mind as the audience considers you.

Advertising Goal 2: Increase Return on Ad Spend

If you utilize this advertising strategy, you’re focused on reaching the right audience as they get nearer to purchase, with the ultimate goal of maximizing the dollar value attributed to that ad campaign.

Advertising Goal 3: Message To Existing Customers

Many small businesses think of advertising as a way of reaching new customers only, but that can be a mistake. Advertising can be a great way to touch existing customers and keep them informed of new products, offerings and programs!

Advertising Goal 4: Increase Leads

Many small businesses want to increase the number of sales-qualified leads they’re seeing and advertising can be a great way to see results here. However, it is important to remember that not all advertising mediums are created equal for leads. YouTube advertising and Facebook advertising might be great ways to increase brand-awareness and move ecommerce products, but they’re not the best advertising approaches for a company that is looking to increase the number of B2B leads. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is probably a better fit for an advertiser looking to increase brand awareness with a professional audience AND increase the number of business leads. Regardless of your unique situation, match your tactic to your end goal for best results!

Advertising Goal 5: Competitive Conquest

If you’re a smaller brand on the scene, it might be a good idea to competitively conquer other brands. In this strategy, your brand uses advertising to make touchpoints with consumers who have a competitor’s product or solution. This approach isn’t for everyone; it often is more expensive to attempt to conquest another brand’s customers. Still, if you are a small business, a competitive conquest campaign is a good way to keep top of mind with a competitor’s customer and increase market share, especially if you offer a unique service or product that your competitors do not.

Advertising Goal 6: Promote Industry Content

We usually recommend this for Business-To-Business companies. The more complicated your product is, the more complicated the advertising becomes. To help educate your audience, we recommend using ads to drive to a whitepaper or blog page for your brand. This ad strategy gives you a low-cost way to get your audience researching your brand and learning why you are an expert in the industry.

Advertise With JSL Marketing & Web Design

It’s tough out in the digital marketing world. Keep your brand’s message in front of your customers and potential customers with JSL Marketing & Web Design! Whether you’re running display ads, passing out branded sweatshirts to your customers, or revamping your Google Ad campaigns, our team is here to help!

Remember, advertising isn’t a stand-alone tactic. It’s a small but vital piece of a comprehensive marketing plan. Small weaknesses in your overall strategy can reduce overall advertising efficacy, whether it’s low brand awareness, a website experience, or unclear target audiences. Partner with JSL Marketing & Web Design to overcome these obstacles and maximize your marketing and advertising strategy!

We offer…

Custom-Tailored Ad Strategies
Regular Strategy Sessions
Market and Ideal Customer Research
Brand Development
Ad-Complementary Landing Page Design
& More!

Fill Out The Contact Form Below To Get In Touch Today!

January 12, 2023

Why Isn’t My Website Getting Traffic?

Your website is a crucial element of your digital marketing and, by extension, your business strategy. The right website can be a simple, but cost-effective way of finding new customers, generating revenue and promoting products and services. However, the mere existence of a website isn’t enough anymore. We wish it was as simple as launching a website and watching the revenue pour in, but sometimes, your website traffic needs some tweaks.

What do you do if your website isn’t getting traffic?

Our team here at JSL Marketing & Web Design collected their thoughts to give you an idea of how to increase your site’s traffic. These recommendations are high-level suggestions. For a full recommendation, consult our team and we can conduct a full site audit for a tailored website recommendation.

Website Traffic Tip 1: Improve Content

Your website is a great way to be found by new customers. Your written web content, however, is king when it comes to discovering new customers. The reason why is pretty simple. The written content you display on your site is what will be crawled, evaluated and read by Google and other search engines. If the relevance is right, the webpage or website in question will be displayed on the search engine results pages.

If your content isn’t up to snuff, you’re losing a potential stream of website traffic. If your website isn’t getting the right type of traffic, we’d recommend evaluating your content strategy.

Depending on your industry and content, you could…

Develop More Content
Rewrite Underperforming Content
Lengthen Content
Evaluate Content Voice & Tone
Offer More Consumer Insight
A/B Test Certain Elements Of Your Written Content

Website Traffic Tip 2: Reevaluate Keywords

Reevaluating keywords is a likely next step if you aren’t seeing as much website traffic as you’d prefer. You can have the world’s best content on your website and still struggle if you’re targeting the wrong keywords. Ideally, when you’re evaluating content, you’ll also look at the keywords targeted and optimize concurrently.

When evaluating your keyword strategy, be sure to…

Evaluate Through A Scraping Tool Like semRush
Focus On Long Tail Keywords
Work To Align To The Most Popular Keywords In Your Area
Consider Competition For Keywords You Want To Rank For

Website Traffic Tip 3: Better Your Website UI

The best keyword strategy and content can’t overcome aesthetics. Google and other search engines might not rank websites based on beauty per se, but site visitors do. If your website is dull, boring, and lackluster, the greater the chance your site visitors bounce off the site as soon as they visit. Google does take this into consideration; the more your site visitors bounce off your site immediately, the lower your rank from Google.

To combat this, work on…

Improving Loadspeed
Adding More Videos & Pictures To Break Up Content
Add Calls To Action
Using White Space To Keep Users Engaged

Website Traffic Tip 4: Acquire Quality Backlinks

Backlinks to and from websites are the highways of the internet. Site users can follow the links from other sites to land on yours. This isn’t just a vehicle for growing traffic; Google actually uses this as a key ranking factor and the reason why stands to reason.

Backlinks indicate that other sites consider your site one of quality. However, it’s not as simple as merely getting any link. Google sees links from quality sites as an indicator that your site is trustworthy.

Website Traffic Tip 5: Better Promote Your Website

Sometimes, the world’s best website needs a little help for better site traffic. Promotion strategies are a great way to fill in the gaps and drive quality site traffic while you work to better your website’s organic ranking. If done right, your business can use social media, Google Ads and email to drive the right customer and potential customer to your website.

It’s important to note the tradeoffs that come with this strategy. Driving customers to your site will require active work and occasionally some ad budgets, but this does come with a benefit. Promotion strategies will have a tangible impact almost immediately. The best SEO strategy, on the other hand, can take months to drive a 200% increase in site traffic.

What then should you do?

To reap the best of both worlds, we’d definitely recommend utilizing website promotion AND SEO strategy simultaneously. You’ll be utilizing ads, social media and email to drive site visitors through your promotion strategy while you work to improve your SEO on the backend. This one-two punch tends to work very well, especially if your website needs some time to climb in Google’s rankings. Ultimately, this will be cheaper in the long run as well and can even improve long-term SEO.

Drive site visitors through…

Email
Organic Social Media
Social Media Ads
Paid Ads

Website Traffic Tip 6: Freshen Technical SEO

Your technical SEO is a nearly-invisible, but critically important aspect of ranking. Google has some 200 unique ranking factors that go into determining where a site will rank. Many of these are quite technical and would be quite hard to diagnose if you weren’t in the day-to-day of site development and SEO.

No single one of these ranking factors will make or break a website’s SEO. Google is too sophisticated for that. However, a combination of technical errors and structural improvements could be hampering your rank. Many times, these technical SEO issues are clustered; if you’re using the wrong site or haven’t invested in a website revamp in a few years, it’s likely a number of these issues will be present together.

We recommend a full site audit to understand…

Your Website’s Site Map
Title Tags, Schema MarkUp & Alt Text
The Site’s Security Precautions
Structured Data
Canonical Tags
Site Uptime & Architecture
& More

Get More Site Traffic With JSL Marketing & Web Design

If your website isn’t getting traffic, it’s probably time to make some changes. Maybe it’s been a few years since you’ve refreshed your site. Maybe you have new competitors in the area. Maybe you don’t know why your website is faltering, but you know you need to do something.

That’s where we come in!

If your website isn’t getting traffic, you need a full SEO audit to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your current website. Your website might not be getting enough traffic, but there are a variety of reasons why that could be and a variety of fixes. It’s important that we understand the particulars of your site before we make any recommendations.

From there, we might suggest….

New Website Content
A Completely New Website
A Redesigned Site
One-Off SEO Tweaks
A Long Term SEO Schedule
A New Promotion Strategy

Your website’s traffic is too important to your business to be left to chance. Turn to Dallas’s best SEO agency to help you get to the top of your local rankings.

Fill Out The Contact Form Below To Get In Touch!

December 15, 2022

How to Create a Marketing Strategy in 7 Easy Steps

How do you create a marketing strategy?

It’s a great question to ask. Research indicates that businesses that think strategically in their marketing see better results. Most brands know they need to evaluate their marketing more strategically.

However, creating a marketing strategy is more complicated than planning your next campaign. Knowing you want to get in better shape is good, but until you take steps to get in shape, all that knowledge is theoretical.

Never fear! The marketing experts from JSL Marketing & Web Design are here to walk you through how marketing strategy development should go and common pitfalls to be aware of.

Read on to Learn More About Marketing Strategies!

Marketing Strategy Dos & Don’ts

Before we run through the process of creating a marketing strategy, let’s start with some ground rules to help guide you through the process.

Do….

Consult With Multiple Members From Diverse Teams

Take Time to Plan

Have Fun

Use Verified Data to Guide Your Strategy

Don’t…

Feel Like Every Idea Needs to Be Perfect

Only Consider What Has Been Done in the Past

Create a Strategy Without Input From Other Teams

Plan Tactics Like SEO or PPC Before You Have a Strategic Goal

How to Create a Marketing Strategy

Now that you have a framework to keep in your back pocket let’s discuss the actual process of creating a marketing strategy!

Look at Your Goals

The world’s best marketing strategy can fail if it doesn’t align with your goals. You must align your marketing strategy with existing business goals for the best results.

Most businesses immediately assume that improvements in revenue are always their topline goals, but that’s not always the case. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on increasing revenue by X percentage, but we caution against automatically assuming that should be your overarching goal.

Sometimes, businesses need to increase the average contract size of their core 50 customers. Sometimes increasing the average order size is a better business goal. Be sure that you know what your business’s goals are, whether it’s an increased number of leads, decreasing churn rate, or getting to the top of Google.

Without this info, your marketing strategy is destined to achieve lackluster results.

Research Your Customers

Knowing your customers is the next step in developing a marketing strategy. Focus on understanding their firmographic info. How many employees do they employ? What industries do they operate in? From there, analyze their pain points. Why do they frequent your business? What problem does your brand solve for them? What are their goals?

It can be helpful to consider this in terms of current and prospective customers. The makeup and goals of your current customer base might differ from your potential customers, which might necessitate different marketing for each customer base. If you have the time, defining multiple subsets of customers could be worthwhile!

Know Your Competitors

Your competitors are the next stop on this journey, so evaluating them makes sense. Your competitors are operating in the same space as you, marketing to the same customers, and will often have similar brand messages, so the more you know about them, the better.

However, knowing the differences between each competitor is an integral part of developing a marketing strategy. Understanding what value propositions, core competencies, and product offerings your competitors offer help you align your business accordingly. Maybe one competitor is the dominant player in your local industry, but their customer service is lacking due to the sheer volume of clients. Maybe another has a great product but positions itself as a high-end solution.

Knowing this, you might decide that your brand should position itself as a white-glove, cost-effective solution, contrasted against the less-personalized Competitor 1 and the more expensive Competitor 2. This differentiation will help you stand out from the competitors and educate potential customers on what you offer: good customer service at a reasonable price. Ideally, customers who want a higher-end solution will go with Competitor 2, and customers who don’t mind less-personalized customer service will go with Competitor 1.

Plan Objectives to Get There

You now have a solid goal and knowledge about your base and competitor, but you still need to get a plan.

You have an overarching goal in mind, and it’s time to plan the steps to get you to your end goal. It’s worth mentioning that this stage probably will see the most variation. A large business’s objectives to increase lead quality necessitate different actions than a small business looking to decrease churn. We can’t give you specifics since it will depend, but we encourage you to think through the following.

What tactics should I use?

Which teams are responsible for this?

Are there internal milestones to pass before another stage can begin? How about external milestones?

Are there seasonality trends to plan around?

Set a Timeline

Your marketing strategy must be timebound. Determine when this strategy will be evaluated and then set your timeline. Every team should know when their objectives are due. Usually, we recommend that you set aside six weeks at least to focus on any campaign. (Usually, a full 3-month quarter is better.)

Launch

It’s time to go live! Now that all the planning is done, it’s time to put rubber on the road. In this step, the content is written, the social media posts are scheduled, and the SEO work is completed. It’s important to note that this marketing work will not produce an immediate result. Moving a client through the marketing funnel takes time, from awareness to consideration to purchase. That’s why it’s so important to set aside time in the future to …

Evaluate

A marketing strategy isn’t done when it launches. Every marketing strategy needs to be evaluated against its benchmark to ensure that it is meeting its goals. Set aside time to return to your marketing strategy and look at results. Maybe everything is working great; maybe you need to make some tweaks. Regardless, be sure that you are constantly double-checking and reevaluating your strategy’s results.

It’s alright to need to adjust. Market conditions are always dynamic; you must evaluate if changes are necessary.

Plan Your Next Marketing Strategy with JSL

Interested in planning a marketing strategy? Call JSL Marketing & Web Design today! We’re an award-winning, Dallas-based, full-service marketing agency, and we’d love to help you with your strategic needs.

We always custom-tailor our marketing strategies to every client’s unique needs, so rest assured that every element of your marketing strategy will be designed to fit your business! We might recommend the following, depending on what we uncover in our conversations and audits.

Email Marketing

SEO

Web Design

Videography

Social Media

Content Marketing

Brand Collateral

Logo Design

& More

Call JSL Marketing & Web Design today to plan your next marketing strategy!

November 24, 2022

Preparing for a Marketing World Without Cookies

If you’ve followed the digital marketing industry in recent years, you know that the deprecation of cookies has been a central point of discussion in marketing. Cookies are slated to be sunset in 2023, but Google has already pushed this timeline back several times. But regardless of whether or not Google keeps its target date, advertisers can no longer rely on cookies as a part of their marketing strategy. This change will ultimately have a lasting impact on the advertising industry, likely to affect everything from ROI to privacy policies.

Luckily, advertisers and small business owners have plenty of time to adjust their strategies, but their changes need to impact the upcoming shift significantly. Here at JSL Marketing & Web Design, we put our heads together and started thinking through the future of advertising. Every business’s game plan for a post-cookie world will be unique, but we put together some starting points to consider.

Keep reading to learn more about marketing in a post-cookie world!

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data that help users identify you. Think of it like a valet park situation. You visit a website and receive a small amount of data that links your computer to you and your searches, much like a parking lot might give you a ticket to identify which vehicle is yours. There are many uses for cookies so we won’t dive into the finer technical details. (But you can read more here if you are interested in learning more!) We can, however, share three of their common uses:

Authentication

Personalization

Tracking

Essentially, cookies help advertisers and websites curate and personalize their message and content to your interests. This also allows advertisers to understand more about you as a user and what advertising content they are interested in.

Are you a small business owner? A heavy news consumer? An Atlanta Falcons fan? A Quick Service Restaurant frequenter? Cookies help advertisers expand their reach outside off-the-shelf data segments and show ads to a particular audience with more efficient data collection.

Naturally, the demise of cookies will have a significant impact on the industry. The main consequences we can expect are

Difficulty personalizing content to users

Difficulty tracking users

Difficulty expanding target audiences

Ultimately, advertisers will have a hard time knowing which users are interested in their product, resulting in less successful paid ad campaigns.

However, Google’s delayed timeline for the deprecation of cookies means you have more time to plan accordingly and develop your strategy for a cookieless future.

Cookie Tip #1: Rely On Other Mediums

You might be lucky if your business spends only some of its marketing budget on advertising. Marketers can use a slew of mediums to reach new customers that will be largely unaffected by the end of cookies. Social media advertising, search engine optimization, and Pay-Per-Click advertising are all tactics you should consider weaving into your outreach. You should be diversifying your marketing tactics already, but the fall of cookies is the perfect excuse to reevaluate what mediums are part of your media mix.

Cookie Tip #2: Put Relationships First

Cookies primarily help advertisers reach, track, and serve new customers, but a marketing strategy that relies on customer loyalty will likely be unscathed by the loss of cookies. We encourage advertisers to keep reaching out to their existing clientele as cookies are sunset. Tactics like email marketing are a great way to engage with your customer base without relying on cookies.

This is good advice for a post-cookie world but also good business advice. Your existing customers are much more likely to convert than new clients, and they are typically a more cost-effective audience. Marketing to your current clients will help your business grow, regardless of whether or not Google allows cookies.

Cookie Tip # 3: Don’t Forget Conversion Rates

Cookies have historically helped advertisers reach people via online advertising. This has led to more potential customers entering any advertiser’s pipeline. However, the end of cookies means many businesses will struggle to categorize and reach potential customers. Most of those brands will likely see fewer people in their marketing funnel. So how do you handle this curveball?

Well, improvements in conversion rates can help brands offset any declines due to a loss of cookies. Suppose you have 100 new leads in a month, and 2% of those can be expected to purchase from you. If those monthly leads decline to 80 a month, but your conversion rate rises to 5%, you’re getting more purchases than before! We suggest focusing on conversion rates and optimizing accordingly for the best results! Changes in email copy, web design, branding, and Calls To Action can boost conversion rates and help you succeed in a cookie-less world!

Cookie Tip #4: Improve The Customer Experience

Since cookies help advertisers reach more people, most advertisers expect a decline in new leads and web traffic post-cookie deprecation. We’ve talked about how conversion rate improvements can offset traffic declines, but improving your customer experience can also help! Responsive web design, quicker customer service via chatbots, and e-commerce landing page optimizations also help streamline your customer experience and reduce the risk of steep traffic declines post-deprecation.

Contact JSL Marketing For A Cookieless Strategy

Need help planning a marketing strategy to deal with these advertising industry changes? Look no further than JSL Marketing & Web Design! We’re an award-winning Dallas marketing agency ready to help you review and optimize your marketing strategy.

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